The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant to ASHP to host a two-week institute in July 2016 on the visual culture of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Following on the heels of our successful summer 2014 institute, this iteration will extend its purview to encompass the ways the war was recorded, reported, represented, and remembered via an array of visual media—including the fine arts, photography, cartoons, prints, and a range of “ephemeral”pictorial items and publications—as well as the visualization of Reconstruction, the postwar West, and the rise of Jim Crow. Institute participants will work with leading scholars in the field and take part in hands-on workshops in local museums and archives. Sessions will address photography and the war front, painting the war, prints and the home front, illustrated journalism, wartime cloth and clothing, envisioning emancipation, the visualization of Native Americans and the postwar West, maps, political cartoons, monuments and memory, and the visual culture of Jim Crow. Institute activities will introduce the rich body of scholarship that addresses or incorporates Civil War and postwar visual culture, encourage further research in the field, and assist participants in developing approaches that use visual evidence to enhance teaching and researching the history of the Civil War era.

Click here for further information about the Institute—and check back later this fall to apply!